Elton John: Never Too Late (2024)

PG-13 for all of the drug references mostly.  A lot of this movie is dedicated to Elton John's years on cocaine.  During this time, he had multiple partners.  The movie never gets explicit, but it does talk about the fact that he felt empty not connecting to people in a more permanent way.  But again, most of this is probably about the cocaine.  That's the PG-13 in my mind.

DIRECTORS: R.J. Culter and David Furnish

I thought I was done!  I had reached the last movie on my "to-write" list for the day.  Then I realized that I never wrote about the Elton John documentary.  Come on.  I was so close to seeing the light of freedom that this is just a kick in the pants for me.  Now, normally I don't write about a movie out of order.  I try to keep everything fresh. But I think I finished this movie within the week.  It's fresh enough and that's going to be made clear by my general disregard for the movie.

The first thing that I have to put out there is that Elton John slaps.  Honest to goodness.  If there is one thing that I've discovered in my adult life is that Elton John is way more talented than I ever gave him credit for when I was a teenager.  He was always kind of a presence in the music scene.  But I wasn't a guy who wanted to go out there and buy Elton John albums.  (For the youth, buying albums was the sole indicator of respect for musicians.) It was only once Rocketman came out that I learned to really get into Elton John.  I'm not talking about the Harland Williams Rocketman.  I'm talking about the one music biopic that I actually like.  Why did I like it?  I mean, you could click the link and it would give you an in-depth read of that movie. But the short and the long of it was that it embraced the musical format for the betterment of storytelling.  

I still encourage you to read that other blog.

But why wasn't I a fan of the documentary?  Part of it comes from the fact that this was a documentary for fans.  I know it was well made.  I'm not dismissing that Never Too Late does its job and does its job well.  What I am saying is that a fan doc tends to be a way to say that you should appreciate the material more than you already do.  There's something deeper there and the true fan needed to know these things.  Is this documentary a little bit tragic?  Oh, absolutely.  A lot of the movie is Elton John finding himself in the wilderness of drug use and loneliness.  But I will say, as a guy who simply digs Elton John, this movie is a bit much.  Part of that comes from the fact that everything that made me appreciate Elton John came from Rocketman in a far more entertaining package.  

Part of the problem comes from the fact that it acknowledges that his Farewell Tour was this great moment in history.  I don't deny that there is something to celebrate with the idea that Elton John was finally done touring and that he is able to spend time with his family.  It's very touching.  But there's me watching, not an Elton John superfan, seeing this moment as a glorified retirement party.  That's not the point of the movie. One of the running visual cues is the name of major cities on the tour, coupled with a countdown to Dodger Stadium.  Because of Rocketman got me a far more entertaining version of the same story --admittedly with different beats --I found myself tuned out.  Sure, there is the interesting story of John Lennon. Sure, I get a better understanding of the relationship between Elton John and Bernie Taupin.  That stuff is great.  

But honestly --and I keep coming back to this well --I can't hear one more story about the music industry and drugs.  I have complete sympathy for John.  He seems incredibly innocent, which seems in line with the Hero's Journey narrative.  When he says that he didn't know what was up with cocaine, while it's a little silly that he didn't, I kind of believe him.  It's all very tragic.  But it's also watching the same story over and over almost without shifting.  You could plant almost any number of artists into the Elton John spot and it would be the same story.  That's so depressing.  If anything, Never Too Late was more depressing than anything else.  It wasn't he cocaine.  It was because, in my mind, Elton John was more interesting than the movie made him out to be.  And if you took the wealth of moments that the movie talked about, you'd think I'm a lunatic.  I just got so tired seeing through the lens that the movie presented the information.

But if I have to look at it with the most rose colored glasses ever, Never Too Late, as its title suggests, is a film about aging.  While most of the movie is about the past (along with some stylisticly bizarre animation at times), the moments in the present show an Elton who both relishes being celebrity megastar Elton John and seeing how the past has caught up with him.  Much of present day Elton John seems to be a man who regrets not being a father earlier in life.  Coupled with the fact that Elton John is a significantly elderly father to two boys, he isn't even home to be a father in a quasi-normal sense.  There's this weight that he seems to carry around with him that screams that, even though he's taken the plunge into being a father, he doesn't feel like he's a dad.  This is so condescending and I'm ashamed of this, but my heart breaks when he's FaceTiming his kids and it feels like a conversation that they are having with a moderately close grandparent.  I don't mean to be ageist, but it doesn't feel like a father-son conversation.

And this is a completely mindboggling takeaway, but as bored as I was for most of the movie, there's a major gap where the story should be.  The flashback / documentary part of the movie is a ramping up of this by who was scorned by his father into this mega-star who was addicted to cocaine.  But then Elton John decides to get clean and the rest of the story is relegated to headlines ultimately leading to the present day.  But if this is a movie about addiction and how Elton John learned to hate music.  But the movie dovetails into him loving music.  Isn't the story in those years that we don't see?  Now, I can see maybe John wanting to avoid talking about this time in his life.  I can't imagine that this isn't an incredibly personal time with some dark soul-searching going on.  But the film sets up this story of misery and redemption.  The problem is that we don't see the journey of that redemption.  Instead, we get cool stories of Elton John meeting famous people and that's fun, but not deep.

So why did I watch this?  It is up for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and you'd think that the Elton John doc would have the Best Original Song on lock.  Not so much.  It was incredibly unmemorable.  But then again, I can't say that I have one that is screaming out at me right now, so maybe it will win.

I'm sorry that I'm not a bigger Elton John fan.  I think his music is incredible, but I'm never going to want to know more about Elton John.  For his fans, maybe this is crucial watching.  I don't get that vibe.  Instead, I get a slightly overproduced and disparate story about a man who rocked pretty hard like every other rock star and now he's kind of done.  That's not the most interesting story in the world.